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Show Grandma Learns Blueprinting in Aircraft School In San Diego there's one school in a great building left over from the San Diego exposition another In a church another even In a once-vacant once-vacant storeroom. They're crammed with students the like of which has never been seen before. Two grandmothers, one white haired, the other pink-cheeked and marcelled, bend together with compass com-pass and rulers over adjoining desks. They are both learning to be mechanical me-chanical draftsmen, to turn out their share of the ten acres of blueprints required to build a single flying battleship. bat-tleship. "How on earth," you ask the Consolidated Con-solidated Vultee teacher, "do you manage to guess that a grandmother grandmoth-er can learn some engineering, when she decides she wants to help In the war?" "It's not so difficult at that" you are told. "First we look for evidence evi-dence of artistic talent Perhaps a woman has done painting, or drawing, draw-ing, or fine arts design. Perhaps she laid a career aside to bring up a family. If she can draw, and if she Is intelligent we can easily teach her mechanical draftsmanship. draftsman-ship. She is straight on her way into the engineering department" In California, where the airframe industry of the nation centers, literally lit-erally hundreds of thousands of people peo-ple have gone to school, and are today to-day at work doing precision Jobs. Most of them were never before in a factory. In an age that has been called revolutionary, here we have the real revolution. The lure of wartime money is not enough to have done this. In San Diego, for Instance, Consolidated early realized that the sort of workers work-ers needed must be appealed to on the basis of their patriotism. |